Writing of the Wa Language

Updated 2006-07-30

Background

There are several alternative transcriptions or orthographies in use
for spelling the sounds of Wa. The first was established by the 1938
publication of the Wa translation of the New Testament of The Bible
by M. Vincent Young, Sara Yaw Shu Chin
(95 years old in 2006 and living in Lashio, Myanmar), and
other Wa-speaking translators. We refer to this as the "Bible orthography,"
"old Bible orthography," or "x-wa-sara." In Chinese it is usually called
lǎowǎwén 老佤文 "old Wa orthography"
or sālāwén 萨拉文 "missionary orthography." This orthography, and variations of it,
are still commonly used today, especially in Myanmar (Burma) and among
Wa Christians. Both because of its historical significance and enduring
currency, it must be reckoned with in our dictionary, in its current
revised form (see below), alongside other orthographies, and can be
generated through an automatic conversion.

Chinese orthography

In the 1950s in the People's Republic of China (PRC), a scientifically-based
orthography was proposed and put into limited use. Like the older Bible orthography,
it used the characters of the Roman alphabet, but also made use of one
or two Cyrillic characters. It was designed to coincide as much as possible with the then new
pinyin romanisation of Chinese characters. Today, a revised, purely-Roman, version of
this orthography is now the one used in official publications in China. A few dozen books
have been published using it, almost all by the Yunnan Nationalities Publishing House
(Yunnan Minzu Chubanshe 云南民族出版社), with an extremely limited audience of fewer
than 100 people --not much more than the coterie of translators, editors, and literary
bureaucrats themselves.

We refer to this as the "Chinese orthography," "PRC orthography", "Wa-CN," or,
by strict ISO standards, "x-wa-CN", i.e., the Wa language (x-wa) as used
and written in China (CN). In Chinese it is known as xīnwǎwén
新佤文, or "new Wa orthography." One distinctive visual feature of the
Chinese orthography is its use of final -x to represent a final glottal
stop -- subsequently adopted in other orthographies. Another signature
trait is the use of nasal+stop consonant-cluster syllable initials such
as "nd-", "nj-", "nb-", and "mg-" to represent voiced unaspirated stop
initials, and "nt-", "nq-", "np-", and "nk-" to represent voiced aspirated
stop initials. These spellings were necessitated by the design requirement of consonance
with pinyin (since Modern Standard Chinese lacks voiced initials and the
pairs "b-/p-","d-/t-", and "g-/k-" represent a contrast in aspiration).
Mastering these nasal+stop consonant-cluster syllable initials is probably
the biggest challenge to all Wa speakers in China in achieving literacy in
their native language. And as a result of using initial "n-" (or "m-")
to represent voicing, about one-sixth of all words in Wa Chinese orthography
begin with the letter "n". In many words beginning with "n-", "m-", and "h-"
(used to mark some aspirated initial-stop consonants), the initial letter of a syllable
reveals nothing of its pronunciation other than voicing or aspiration.
Thus it is impractical to use initial letters as abbreviations in Wa Chinese orthography,
as in other Roman-script languages.

Breathy (or lax) register in syllables is indicated by a macron (bar) over the first vowel in
the syllable. However, numerous publications have dispensed with the
use of macrons entirely.

Myanmar-based orthographies

Meanwhile, several revisions and improvements to the original Bible
orthography have also been proposed. Among these "revised Bible orthographies"
is one used in the 1990s in publications of the Wa Welfare Society (WWS) in Chiangmai,
Thailand. It has been developed further by the Wa authorities in
Pang Kham (Pang Hsang), Wa Special Region 2, in a series of literacy primers for use by
the troops in the United Wa State Army (UWSA).

We refer to this orthography as "Myanmar orthography,"
"Revised Bible orthography," "Wa government orthography," "Wa-MM," or "x-wa-MM,"
i.e., the Wa language (x-wa) as used and written in Myanmar (MM). It
is sometimes called in Chinese shànwǎwén
善佤文, or "improved missionary orthography" (with a perhaps unintended double entendre
with 掸佤文 "Shan [State] orthography"). It is also used by a dedicated
development organization, Sipeem Tawx Bwan:, founded by Marcus Young,
who is the grandson of M. Vincent Young. Sipeem Tawx Bwan: (STB) works
with Wa-speaking people, and is based in Mae Sai, northern Thailand.

All the revised Bible orthographies represent the phonological distinctions
of Wa more accurately than the original Bible orthography. They also
adopt from the Chinese orthography the use of -x to represent a final
glottal stop. One signature contrast with the Chinese orthography, however,
is the continued use of "aw" for the common half-open back rounded vowel
(IPA ɔ []
), whereas the Chinese orthography uses "o". Another recent innovation
and signature contrast is the use of a colon ( : ) after many syllables
to mark them as clear (non-breathy) or tense register syllables (i.e.,
those syllables which do not have a macron over the
first vowel in the Chinese orthography). The revised Bible orthographies,
like International Phonetic Alphabet, use initial "b-", "d-", and "g-" for
voiced stops, while in the Chinese orthography, these represent unvoiced
unaspirated initial stops, as they do in Chinese pinyin romanisation.

The various versions of Wa Bible orthography have been used to publish
a dozen or so titles in Myanmar and Thailand in the last twenty years.
The bulk of these are Bible-related and Christian in inspiration and the reading audience is
in turn predominantly Christian, numbering perhaps a few thousand--a much larger number than for
texts in Chinese Wa orthography. A handful of published texts are Buddhist or secular in content, with an
unknown readership. So there is the irony that on the Chinese side of the border there
is an abundance of titles and content in Chinese orthography and paucity of readers,
while on the Myanmar side of the border there is a much more restricted variety of
content available in Myanmar orthography, with a many-times larger, but still small, potential readership.

The differences in look and feel between the orthographic systems is apparent from the comparison
below of the sentence in Wa 'Have you read my letter yet?'.

Unified Wa orthography

We also have a page describing our experimental
Unified Wa orthography, which synthesises a normalised version of the syllable-initial
consonantal system of the Myanmar orthography with the syllable-final vowel and
suprasegmental system of the Chinese orthography. One possible application for Unified Wa orthography
will be to reissue the entire digital library of texts in Wa on CD in a single consistent, normalised form,
which will be convertible to other orthographies via the automatic Wa
Orthography Converter.

Serial arrangement

The Chinese orthography, based on the precedent of Chinese pinyin, is arranged in the dictionary using
the familiar a-b-c alphabetical order. The Myanmar orthography can also be arranged alphabetically, although
the specific order of words is quite different from that of the Chinese orthography. But the Wa authorities
in Pang Kham (Pang Hsang) present the Roman letters in a phonetically logical matrix, in the style of Indic scripts.
A serial order can be tentatively constructed on the basis of the matrices for 58 syllable-initial consonants and
consonant clusters, 26 nuclear vowels and polyphthongs, and 16 final consonants, as shown in the table belowː

-uai-: e.g., kuaik, kuaih, kuaix, puaik (OT "hawt pheet puaik tix" -- only case of -uai- in whole OT-NT), juaing. vuai, etc.
Note to ourselves: E.g, If not -uai-, what should these syllables be in Wa-MM instead? As stopgap, make -wa- same ID as -ua-, use -wa- ID for -uai-?

There is also a Comprehensive
Comparative Chart of Wa Orthographies. However,
this may overtax your browser, since it is a large 525KB, 16,000-line
file containing every conceivable syllable in Wa. If you have difficulty viewing
it, you may do better by downloading it to your hard drive (right-click
of the mouse in Windows) and open it in a plain-text editor or word-processor
which supports Unicode, such as the Windows Notepad, Macintosh OSX
TextEdit, or MS Word for Windows. The file is in Unicode UTF-8 format.
To see the IPA characters as well, as noted in our fonts
and character display section, you will need a Unicode font which
contains IPA characters.

You can also try out the on-line automatic Wa
Orthography Converter on our Interactive Tools Page. The converter
can also be used to convert files when run from a command prompt (a local Perl interpreter such as ActiveState
ActivePerl is required).

Conclusion

In summary, the Chinese orthography and the Myanmar (revised Bible) orthography, in its principal post-2000 variations, are
included in the Wa dictionary database, alongside a phonetic transcription using the International
Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The final printed dictionary will also include at least a cross-index for looking up
entries in the original Bible orthography.